Google Goa: Part 3 - The best laid plans of men and bamboo often go awry

The bamboos had arrived. All we had to do was get them to the 5th floor, drive in a few nails, tie a few knots and the beach shack would be done; or so we thought. Our first miscalculation was that the 12 and 15 feet pieces didn't fit in the elevators. We tried the stairs, but they we closed on account of construction (apparently we were not the only ones building something at the complex). The solution around the problem was to solicit the help of 3 other people so that there was one person standing on the balcony of each floor. I picked up bamboo on the ground floor and passed it to Shailen on the first floor, who in turn passed it to someone on the second floor, till it eventually ended in a pile on the 5th floor. The chain got so good at some point that we had 3 pieces going up simultaneously, which was kinda scary for the guy at the bottom.

The rest of the stuff was easy enough to carry up in the elevators. The receptionist propped the door open for us with a smile that suggested that she was thinking something like "Boy, you must be two kinds of crazy". It took us several trips to get everything up, and on every trip, everyone who saw us was both curious as well helpful in getting the stuff to the top.

As soon as we started building we realized our 2nd mistake - the cross cut saw. It all looks easy when the carpenter does it but none of us had the skills required to make the saw go in both directions. Maybe the facilities folks in the building had a hacksaw. So off we went to find the building carpenter. He didn't have a hacksaw, but what he did have was an electrical drill. Score! The facilities manager suggested that the carpenter could nail everything in for us, but we wanted to do it on our own, a concept he found extremely confounding. Home Depot would be a complete failure in India.

Off we went with the drill, thinking that if we drilled a hole through the bamboo, we could pass a rope through it and that would make for a better joint. On the very first attempt, the drill made a beautiful round hole, but the hole was too small. 0 for 3. An attempt to widen the hole by moving the drill around led to disaster - the bit (needle) broke. 0 for 4. It was time to make a trip to the hardware store to get a replacement drill bit and the a hacksaw. Yes, the very same hacksaw that was earlier shunned as being too small for this grand project.

Little did we know that the breaking of the drill bit would be such a fortuotus event. As we searched for the saw and drill bit, we found screws. Nuts and bolt to be exact. With the right size hole and the proper nut and bolt to go with it, why do we even need to use rope. We could bolt everything together. We had finally caught a break. The tide had tuned. It was all going to work out fine.

And it did. The hacksaw took some effort but at least it worked. The drill and the bolts worked like a charm. In just a couple of hours we had a basic frame in place. Any place that the sticks overlapped was drilled into place. Even at the T junctions, we split a bamboo piece into two and bolted the connector to both bamboo pieces.

For three days, every afternoon around 4, the office was converted to a construction site, with the noise and the sawdust from the drilling bringing work at the office to a grinding halt. Work continued till 10:30 - 11 each night with only a small break for dinner. We had enough burns and scratches on our arms that had it not been for the shack, people would have thought that we were mainlining it.

Three days later though we had a beautiful shack. Tonya took some pictures on one of the days - I'll ask her to upload them somewhere that everyone can see them. The shack looks awesome, if I may say so myself. If you were ever on a deserted island, your best shot at surviving the elements would be to have us there; assuming of course that you had an electrical drill, electricity and a hardware store.